Bakker LII: Ol' Golgotterath Blues

[Darth Richard II]

OK, Look, I'm going to give you some advice against you better judgement.

1. You keep brining up "personal attacks". I don't think you know what that really means, and you need to stop crying it at every opportunity.

and

2. You need to stop it with the "only this site is mean to me" bullshit.

Both of these are going to get you banned really, really quick.

[Ran]

I'm posting here so that I'll be seeing when further posts happen. I'm perfectly willing to ban multiple people, to be honest. There's an ignore feature if you find someone's contributions unhelpful or uninteresting, folks -- use it.

[Darth Richard II]

16 hours ago, IllusiveMan said:

But then Bakker had to do that AMA and honestly I'm left stunned. Like, how is it genuinely possible for a text to make complete and utter sense and answer every question (virtually) when read on it's own, but make zero sense when given author intent? I honestly don't get it and it's why I assume Bakker has to be lying or being misinterpreted. I honestly just don't see how it call all read so clearly a certain way, with lines and evidence supporting it, only to discover that all that evidence was happenstance and the author meant everything a different way that goes counter to how the scene plays out? Like literally the lines about striking treaties with the pit and seeing Hell as a well of bottomless power to conquer...they make no sense as said by anyone other than Kellhus. 

 

There have been a few other examples of this in both literature and Movies/TV but for some reason I'm blanking on what. I think it was probably either a Lynch or M. Night film, but I remember post release the director explaining things in an interview and it pretty much made no sense given the actual film.

(Although on a different note, if you want to see a flim where just about every single person who worked on it from the direct to the actors to like, the boom mic guy have a different view on things the original Blade Runner has some great documentaries. )

[PapushiSun]

16 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I think it was probably either a Lynch or M. Night film, but I remember post release the director explaining things in an interview and it pretty much made no sense given the actual film.

Was it Donnie Darko?

[Callan S.]

On 12/12/2017 at 5:26 PM, IllusiveMan said:

I honestly just don't see how it call all read so clearly a certain way, with lines and evidence supporting it, only to discover that all that evidence was happenstance and the author meant everything a different way that goes counter to how the scene plays out? Like literally the lines about striking treaties with the pit and seeing Hell as a well of bottomless power to conquer...they make no sense as said by anyone other than Kellhus. 

I don't understand that last example - what do you mean they make no sense as said by anyone other than Kellhus? Did Bakker say something on that? Do you have a link?

On the first sentence, it seems a lot of readers don't see interpretive ambiguity in text - what they see is how it IS. Rather than one interpretation amongst many. It's one of the big issues of the 'post truth' world and the internet facilitating it.

Anyway, the book itself runs like a probability trance - many scenes could be many things - some interpretations could have a very high probability, some low. But they are self assigned.

To me, Kellhus was compromised some time earlier down the track by a very powerful psychic force. I think Bakker referred to the idea of failing a saving throw of the dice.

But in traditional fantasy reading, god does not play dice. In traditional fantasy, all good deeds and bad deeds and other feelings all tie up into a conclusion that's based on those deeds, like some sort of hard math equation being completed. With no randomisers in it.

But, dun dun DUN! Bakker played D&D - a universe definitely chock full of randomisers. Pretty much like the real world (given sufficiently advanced physics interactions are indistinguishable from randomness)

[Hello World]

Quote

But, dun dun DUN! Bakker played D&D - a universe definitely chock full of randomisers. Pretty much like the real world (given sufficiently advanced physics interactions are indistinguishable from randomness)

Huh? What's advanced physics exactly? 

[Darth Richard II]

Saying something is D&D based and you can see the D&D isn't usually considered a compliment, but ok, sure, why not.

[Callan S.]

3 hours ago, Hello World said:

Huh? What's advanced physics exactly? 

It's a stretch of an Arthur C Clarke quote, as you probably saw - the reason a rolled dice seems random is because you are not privy to the many, many tiny physical interactions involved. If you were you could call the result of a hand rolled die every time. The thing is people often want meaning determinist fantasy - every sin or saintly act somehow ties up at the end (in a kind of judgement day), you don't just have someone do something and then...it goes nowhere just arbitrarily. Like Mimara trecking all that way but never seeing Kellhus with the judging eye. And yet that judging eye was as random as shit in when it opened - why would it open at the right time? Moral determinism Vs pragmatic appraisal of random events.

Over on r/bakker someone suggested the ending was a kind of 'deus ex machina'. Which are traditionally used to tie up events neatly. Just a matter of how contrived they are for a reader. I think they might be on the money, but the no god is an anti deus ex machina. The no god unravels meaning, perhaps like a chorae unravels magic, making all the plots like Mimara's quest to spy Kellhus with the eye end up at arbitrary endings. The people complaining about how all these plots did not resolve - this is the no god unraveling meaning into anti climax, the opposite of a deus ex machina tying all the threads together into a climax.

The thing is D&Ds system (any edition) is terrible for doing moral deterministic fantasy. D&D ends up a lot like the ending of TUC - shit just happens. So I think Bakker ran into Moral determinism Vs pragmatic appraisal a long time ago. It's a genuinely philosophical conflict of world views - and maybe the no god is the gatekeeper.

[IllusiveMan]

6 hours ago, Callan S. said:

I don't understand that last example - what do you mean they make no sense as said by anyone other than Kellhus? Did Bakker say something on that? Do you have a link?

 

I was referring to Kellhus's lines in the Golden Room. Prior to the AMA, the reading of the text left me (and I believe others) thinking that Kellhus was in control, that he made a bargain with Ajokli and allowed him to take over to defeat the Consult. 

But upon the AMA, it seems that there was no bargain and that Ajokli was playing Kellhus from the beginning and taking over was not something Kellhus intended or expected at all.

But it just doesn't really jive with the text if we are led to believe that Ajokli it talking all along and not Kellhus. The lines I referred to were 'striking treatises with the pit', seeing himself descending as hunger, seeing Hell as fathomless power that he would conquer - those lines really only make sense if it is purely Kellhus saying them, with the assumption that he and Ajokli are a team. The idea that he was subsumed by Ajokli without any knowledge of it and that it was Ajokli speaking all along just doesn't really make sense, but per the AMA seems to be the case. 

[IllusiveMan]

My only real interpretation of Bakker's claims in the AMA is as I said before. Kellhus did make a pact with Ajokli to overcome the Consult. There's too much evidence against it and nothing Bakker said explicitly refutes this. 

What he meant by not knowing about Ajokli was that he simply didn't expect Ajokli to take completely over and leave him helpless/blind. So in essence, Kellhus planned everything right up until his head went Ghost Rider - that was when Ajokli took over completely to do whatever he wanted, with wasn't something Kellhus had expected. Otherwise I really don't think it makes any sense. 

[Callan S.]

21 minutes ago, Triskele said:

The notion that Kellhus was completely played does not.  Unless maybe Ajokli is to evil that he's just pretending to be Kellhus for the build-up lines just like the Consult pretended with a hologram that Kellhus had won.

Well, we have the 'Who better to burn them?' scene, where Kellhus is talking to...himself?

To me it seems pretty straight forward - perhaps especially since we've seen Kellhus infect the minds of others, essentially. He was piecemeal compromised, probably starting with the circumfix and the vulnerability he had there. It seems just as plausible as a virus getting into a computer - Ajokli managed to get a worm in past a security breach, then used that to further compromise the system slowly over time. By the time we get to Golgoterath, Kellhus is mostly a zombie - much like those ants where a fungus takes over their minds to make them climb to the end of grass stems. Alive, but hardly in control. The golden room wasn't planned, it was just the tip of the grass.

I also wonder, if we turn up the difficulty a lot, whether Ajokli IS Kellhus - he went mad enough not just to become a ciphrang, but a godling. But Ajokli Kellhus is witless of his origin point. Even as it made hacking Kellhus much easier, because Ajokli is Kellhus and so he was indistinguishable from Kellhus's own thoughts, for being his own thoughts. But that's quite an extra theory and I know a lot of people want Cnaiur to be Ajokli.

[Hello World]

4 hours ago, Callan S. said:

you don't just have someone do something and then...it goes nowhere just arbitrarily

Because this usually doesn't make for good stories, you know. The thing is, Bakker can make this work, he can take out an essential component of story telling, sure, but then he has to replace it with something else that makes the whole thing worthwhile. I'm not sure that he did that here, especially since his defense was "real life doesn't have closure", but this isn't real life... 

[Dora Vee]

11 hours ago, Hello World said:

Because this usually doesn't make for good stories, you know. The thing is, Bakker can make this work, he can take out an essential component of story telling, sure, but then he has to replace it with something else that makes the whole thing worthwhile. I'm not sure that he did that here, especially since his defense was "real life doesn't have closure", but this isn't real life... 

Yup. That's pretty much how I see it. Using "real life" as a reason only goes so far.

[Kalbear]

One of the reasons we like stories is because stories do, actually, have closure.

[Callan S.]

12 hours ago, Triskele said:

But how would you square that with Nayu possessed by Ajokli screaming at the Whirlwind?  It is confusing because it further implies a total duality with Kellhus and Ajokli and nothing close to a singularity.

I'm not sure how it implies duality? Ajokli is rather like an agent in the matrix, able to inhabit stuff connected to the matrix (well actually stuff that has gone mad and starts to bleed through to the outside, but that's not the important part here). How would Ajokli possessing Cnaiur mean Ajokli can't be Kellhus with possessing powers?

On a side note, it's interesting that Cnaiur shifted from Gilgaol to Ajokli - I think Bakker said 'Hate had become impotent'. Cnaiur was starting to decide what possessed him?

 

11 hours ago, Hello World said:

Because this usually doesn't make for good stories, you know. The thing is, Bakker can make this work, he can take out an essential component of story telling, sure, but then he has to replace it with something else that makes the whole thing worthwhile. I'm not sure that he did that here, especially since his defense was "real life doesn't have closure", but this isn't real life... 

This is the no god.

Can a fantasy creature/object be so strong as to damage the very nature of the narrative - is that fair play, to write of a creature that powerful?

If you'd say no, then fair enough.

On a side topic, I feel broad questions were answered. If Bakker had been vague about whether the great ordeal ever reached Golgoterath at all or had had simply had the golden room scene happen off screen and implied it only, I think I'd be annoyed - to me those are essential story components. To me, Earwa has never struck me as one that was going to fulfill what I want to see - if it had from the outset acted like it would, but then didn't at the end, I'd call that a bait and switch. But it's been a world full of things I don't want to happen - Mimara not getting to see Kellhus with the judging eye (which proves so random in its opening) is just another thing. But I do frame it like a game - you can play Nethack really well, get right near the end then get picked off right before the end. That's valid play and that's actually a valid story, though a grim one.

But framing narrative through the lens of being a game, I get that's not traditional narrative. However, I feel traditional narrative has been bastardised a fair bit. Most traditional narratives had a moral to them, implying some way of acting in real life. Work hard like the ant to gather resources for winter is coming, or die like the lazy grasshopper. But narrative now is tailored to flatter the reader, to have bad asses or the fought over romantic interest with hollow enough personalities that the reader can occupy them (kinda like Ajokli does) with no actual real life moral to take away from it all. So, really I don't give much of a fuck if that kind of storytelling gets fucked over. It's toxic anyway.

People can argue there isn't a moral to be had from the second apocalypse series either.

But if there is one or more to be had from it, yes, it's been at the expense of flattering fantasy.

[Dora Vee]

I don't think that fantasy has to be flattering. I personally don't mind certain tropes getting harpooned, it's just that like Hello World, said, it would need to be replaced with something worthwhile. Otherwise, people simply aren't going to be interested anymore.

But, then again, what IS worthwhile? In a case like that, it really depends on who you ask.

[.H.]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

One of the reasons we like stories is because stories do, actually, have closure.

Most stories do, some don't though.  I personally don't find that bothersome, but everyone's results are going to vary.

Personally, I don't find Bakker's take on closure jarring or surprising, since he likes McCarthy enough to tote Blood Meridian around with him all the time.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, .H. said:

Most stories do, some don't though.  I personally don't find that bothersome, but everyone's results are going to vary.

Personally, I don't find Bakker's take on closure jarring or surprising, since he likes McCarthy enough to tote Blood Meridian around with him all the time.

Yeah, that's fair. Though I think Blood Meridian is less lacking closure than lacking perfect closure; it has several interpretations that fit, just not one objective one, but any of them are reasonable to assume. Having nothing at all is not the same thing.

It is, however, a bit jarring given that this was supposed to be the thing that provided at least some answers or closure per Bakker. Again, the problem isn't the text, it's the selling of it and the expectations set. 

[.H.]

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, that's fair. Though I think Blood Meridian is less lacking closure than lacking perfect closure; it has several interpretations that fit, just not one objective one, but any of them are reasonable to assume. Having nothing at all is not the same thing.

It is, however, a bit jarring given that this was supposed to be the thing that provided at least some answers or closure per Bakker. Again, the problem isn't the text, it's the selling of it and the expectations set. 

IIRC both The Road and No Country for Old Men have even less closure than Blood Meridian, for whatever that's worth (i.e. nothing), and I feel reasonably certain that he's probably read those too.

I am the first to admit that the whole SA series is incredibly hard to sell in general though.  And proof positive that Bakker is his own worst publicist.  In fact, I'm ready to say that perhaps no publicity is better than what Bakker does for himself.

[Darth Richard II]

6 minutes ago, .H. said:

IIRC both The Road and No Country for Old Men have even less closure than Blood Meridian, for whatever that's worth (i.e. nothing), and I feel reasonably certain that he's probably read those too.

I am the first to admit that the whole SA series is incredibly hard to sell in general though.  And proof positive that Bakker is his own worst publicist.  In fact, I'm ready to say that perhaps no publicity is better than what Bakker does for himself.

Oh, I don't think anyone would argue against that. Even people over at that other forum will agree Bakker is horrible with the publicity.